Chapter 6 Judgement Day #2
“Not that it’s of any interest to anyone, least of all me,” Evans said when Denholm had melted away, “but I’ve been given a list of ‘pageantmasters,’ which is a job I never even knew existed until recently.
Ede, Paine, Swinson, Gwen Lally—she’s rather frightening.
Here’s a Mr. Gilmore from Brighton, who was ‘formerly pageantmaster to the King of Siam.’ If Mr. Gilmore could handle the King of Siam, then perhaps he could manage Guildford.
” (Guildford, for some reason, was problematic.) “Let’s hope they’re interested in a bit of social history, but I expect we’ll get the usual corn dollies and fair maidens skipping round maypoles.
This kind of stuff feeds us a version of history that makes us feel good about ourselves.
There’s no future for us, so they’re making one up out of the past.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” the Boy asked.
“The Establishment. The Powers That Be.” Evans shrugged. “Who knows? Not thee and me, anyway.” He ran out of polemic and lit a Woodbine.
“What else do you make the future out of, if not the past?” Flynn puzzled.
“And why shouldn’t we feel good about ourselves?” Badger added. “And what’s more, I’m rather partial to fair maidens skipping round maypoles. If only they were partial to me. We need more maypoles, in fact. They’re so gloriously phallic.”
“What does that mean—fallick?” the Boy asked.
They all looked to Evans in his role as the Boy’s mentor. After some consideration he said, “It’s the same meaning as mythic—miffic—but it’s a bit of a stupid word. If you use it in public, people will treat you like an idiot.”
The Boy laughed. “I won’t be using it, then.”
“Well played, Mr. Evans,” Maud Ogilvie murmured.
“Oh, and here you go, Flynn,” Evans said, perking up. “I take your Mitzi Blinkhorn and raise you one Major Lawrence du Garde Peach. He sounds like he was born to be a pageantmaster.”
—
Flynn abstained from lunch, still bilious from the morning’s cake, and instead spent the hour wandering through Chancery, braced by a chill spring wind that had blown away the morning’s rain.
He ended up in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The daffodils here were almost finished, apart from one little patch of stragglers still flowering on heroically against the odds.
Why would you want to confine them to poetry?
One of the entrants for the Festival Poems had been a sham Wordsworthian hymn to the poor flowers.
They had “faces of gold” and “swooned in the warm arms of the zephyr” and so on.
Could a daffodil swoon? It seemed unlikely.
Lifting his own pale face to the weak sun, Flynn found himself not swooning but thinking unexpectedly about how in the school holidays at the merest hint of fine weather he and his brother would jump on their bikes and race out of town as if an advancing enemy were on their heels.
They would cycle for miles with a youthful stamina that Flynn could barely imagine now, straining to the top of Sutton Bank before freewheeling back down, screaming like maniacs at the speed they could achieve.
It was amazing that they didn’t kill themselves.
They went all over—Pocklington, Hutton-le-Hole, even as far as Scarborough sometimes, where they ate hot salty chips on the pier.
Otherwise, it was water from a stream, or a bottle of ginger beer and two slices of roughly cut bread slapped around a slice of ham, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs that they peeled and dipped in a little twisted paper of salt.
On one magnificent occasion, never to be forgotten, they had an extravagant high tea at the Black Swan in Helmsley, paid for by Charlie’s paper round (gammon and fried eggs, buttered tea loaf, scones warm from the oven with clotted cream and strawberry jam).
They were not particularly close growing up—their characters were too different—but they were the best of friends during these madcap excursions.
Perhaps if Charlie had survived the war they would have grown more attached to each other over time, although the opposite seemed more likely.
Flynn would never know now. He felt keenly the loss of something he had never had.
When he heard Big Ben chiming the hour, he rose from the bench and left the daffodils behind to an afternoon unmolested by poetry.
—
Denholm reappeared, sleek from lunch in Simpson’s.
He patted his gibbous belly (waxing rather than waning) and said, “Say what you like about Dangerfield, he’s not afraid of a good roast and a steamed suet pudding.
Jam roly poly,” he added. “A personal favourite of mine. Called it ‘dead baby’ at school.” (Maud Ogilvie made a quiet mewl of protest.) “And on a cheerier note, as predicted, Dangerfield was very pleased with Mitzi’s triumph.
Almost seemed to expect it. He is going to give Mitzi the good news himself. Anoint her, as it were.”
“Anoint? With what?” asked Flynn.
“The holy oil of Bollinger probably, knowing Mitzi. You know, Dangerfield’s quite keen on the idea of the cake being baked on site. You’re in charge of the Rooms in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion, Mr. Flynn, are you not?”
“Well, I would hardly say ‘in charge.’ The Rooms Committee’s in charge, I just keep them up to date on the progress.”
“And is it not so that one of those rooms is a Kitchen?” Denholm asked, ignoring this attempt at rebuttal.
Flynn had a sense of foreboding. “There are several Kitchens, actually,” he admitted reluctantly.
“There’s the ‘Breakfast Bar Kitchen with Living Room’—that’s for the lower classes.
And there’s a ‘Farmhouse Kitchen and Dining Room for a Country House’—that’s middle class.
” It was hard to believe the Express was still fulminating about the Festival’s socialist tendencies when the hierarchies of class were being so closely attended to.
“Any others?” Denholm asked.
“There’s one I forget the name of. It’s an open-planned kitchen-living-room something or other.”
“I believe,” Maud Ogilvie intervened, “that it is—and here I quote—designed to bring the housewife back where she belongs into the social life of the family, even when she’s hard at work preparing dinner.
Because apparently, Mr. Denholm, even in this modern day and age, a woman must not stray too far from stove and sink.
The housewife is born free, and yet everywhere she is in chains. ”
Denholm tried not to be cowed by this Rousseau-esque outburst. He had initially had Miss Ogilvie down as a rather quaint old biddy, prudely spinsterish in mind and body, not as a “feminist” supporter. “Are you a Marxist, Miss Ogilvie?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Denholm,” she said. “I’m a woman.”
“Equal before God,” Evans murmured.
“That’s not helpful, Mr. Evans,” Denholm said.
He pressed on bravely. “Well, I like the sound of that Kitchen. I think it would be most fitting to bake the Festival Cake in it. An audience could watch Mitzi ‘at work,’ as it were, and then when the cake comes out of the oven they could sample a slice. Tea and cake—what could be more English?”
“British,” the Boy corrected helpfully.
“It could be a ‘performance’ at a certain time every afternoon, just like the weekly cookery demonstrations she does for Parkinson—the gas-cooker people. She works for them, you know. These shows are very popular with women apparently. It seems she has a following.”
The cake was never meant to be baked, Flynn explained to Denholm.
“How can you have an unbaked cake? It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“And there’s no plan to connect any of the electrical appliances in the Rooms. That might be a bit of a drawback. There’s no gas on site either. And the sinks won’t be plumbed in.”
“A gas cooker with no gas?” Denholm riddled. “A sink with no water?”
“They’re just showrooms,” Flynn persisted patiently. “For show.”
“And also,” Maud Ogilvie bolstered him, “it’s far from being a plain cake. It would have to cool before it could be decorated with all its various folderols. And watching a cake cool is a tedious task, rather like watching the proverbial paint dry. People will rebel.”
“Rebel?” Denholm said. “We’re talking about cake, Miss Ogilvie.”
“So was Marie Antoinette, although of course she never actually said that famous quote. I suppose all history can be viewed through the prism of misinterpretation. Furthermore, and perhaps more pertinently, it’s a ludicrously expensive cake to make.”
While a flustered Denholm was trying to come up with a response, Flynn added, “And you have to take into consideration that Mitzi’s very popular.
The Kitchens aren’t designed for audiences, and the whole idea of the Rooms is that people flow from one to the next. Mitzi would create quite a bottleneck.”
“Nor is the government about to raise the tea ration any time soon,” Maud Ogilvie added.
“The eateries on site have been given considerable dispensation already, considering that the country is still making up the shortfall in imports that was caused by the strikes on the Indian railways and the port of Calcutta last year.” Flynn suspected she was trying to bore Denholm to death, using ennui as her weapon.
“Where are you getting this information from?”
“Hansard.”
“You read Hansard?” The idea filled Denholm with horror.
“Parliamentary proceedings are more interesting than you might think.”
“Eggs!” the Boy shouted, eager to contribute something to the recipe. “You need eggs to make a cake, don’t you? Do you?” he added doubtfully, turning to Badger, who was strangely knowledgeable on the subject of poultry.
“Sussex, Marans, Wyandottes,” Badger said. “Buff Orpingtons—that’s a good-looking chicken.”
“How do you know this?” Denholm frowned.
“My father was what you might call a fancier.”
“I thought he was a peer.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“They’ve got chickens in Country,” the Boy said. “I’ve never eaten chicken,” he added wistfully.
“And let’s not forget sugar,” Maud Ogilvie said.